At present, with the development of radio communication network technologies, new radio communication systems are capable of supporting more users and providing a higher spectrum efficiency to obtain the maximum system capacity. Some services, such as Voice Over IP (VoIP), Gaming and video conference, are featured with small data packet, high real-time performance and a great number of users. Thus, it is extremely important for such services to utilize system resources fully and effectively to lower the signaling overhead of a minimum resource allocation description.
In the dynamic resource allocation mode of the current institute for electrical and electronic engineers (IEEE) 802.16e system, resources are dynamically allocated for each user, and the identifier of each user and resource information are indicated in a control message during each allocation. This dynamic allocation mode leads easily to a high control message overhead when there are a great number of users. For instance, the control overhead of a VoIP user can account for 40%-50% of the total downlink resources of a system. The permanent allocation method of the IEEE 802.16e system can lower the overhead of the VoIP service, however, the error control mechanism and the hole filling mechanism are relatively complicated, and moreover, the permanent allocation method is only applicable to periodic services with size-fixed resources but not users using services with resources greatly changing in size, such as Gaming.
On this ground, a group-based resource allocation method is proposed in related technologies by which multiple users are divided into one group and the resources of each user group are allocated and managed, and which saves the description overhead of each user identifier during each resource allocation. However, this technical solution limits the size of the data packets of all the users in a group. And additionally, it is needed to divide multiple groups for different kinds of services or different kinds of VoIP service voice coders and coding rates, leading to more limitations to grouping and a higher complexity of management.
Furthermore, the technical solution above takes no consideration of the indication of a resource allocation for a data packet in a silent period. As VoIP service is featured with being switched between a silent period and an active period, a data packet in a silent period is smaller that a data packet in an active period, and correspondingly, the number of the resource units occupied by a data packet in a silent period is smaller than that of the resource units occupied by a data packet in an active period. For instance, a data packet in a silent period occupies a resource unit, and only 1 bit is needed to indicate the size of the used resources, and a data packet in an active period occupies 6 resources units, and 3 bits are needed to indicate the number of the used resource units. Using the same number of bits to indicate the number of the allocated resource units for a user in the active period and a user in the silent period will cause a high overhead. And on the other hand, the technical solution above takes no consideration of an overhead-saving resource allocation and indication method for a user added in a group and a user removed from a group.